Ministry of Defence

Opposition Day Defence Industry and Shipbuilding Debate: 11 July 2018

earl howe: My right hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State and Minister for Defence People and Veterans (The Rt Hon Tobias Ellwood MP) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement. I wish to clarify statements I made during the Opposition Day Debate on the Defence Industry and Shipbuilding, Official Report, 11 July 2018, Vol. 644. The information should have been: No UK shipyard provided a final bid for the auxiliary oiler ships recently purchased from South Korea. It cannot therefore be known whether the ships would have cost twice as much had they been purchased from a UK shipyard. However, the prices offered by South Korean yards were substantially lower than those of any alternative and, as a result, taxpayers are paying less than they would have had we adopted a different strategy. Considering the totality of the programme, including UK customisation work, the programme has a UK work content worth some £180 million, around a third of the total acquisition costs.